Interesting thoughts!

Dr. Porco further believes that Enceladus's orbit could have been much more eccentric in the past. The greater the eccentricity, the greater the tidal squeezing, and the resulting structural variations produce heat. In this case, the heat would have been saved inside the icy moon, melting some of the ice to replenish the liquid water sea. Dr. Porco continued to explain that "(T)he tidal flexing occurring now is not enough to account for all the heat presently coming out of Enceladus. One way out of this dilemma is to assume that some of the heat observed today was generated and stored internally in the past... (N)ow that the orbit's eccentricity has lessened, the heat emanating from the interior is a combination of heat produced today and in the past."

The astronomers found that larger craters, which excavated pits much deeper into the Moon's surface, only increased porosity in the underlying crust. This indicates that these deeper layers have not reached a steady state in porosity, and are not as fractured as the megaregolith.

Most of the moons of our Sun's family circle the quartet of large gaseous planets located in our Solar System's outer limits: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. The four solid inner planets--Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars--are almost entirely moonless. Earth is the only inner planet that hosts a large Moon, while Mars sports only a pathetic duo of misshapen little Moons (Phobos and Deimos), that are either captured asteroids that escaped from the Main Asteroid Belt between Mars and Jupiter, or are instead the outcome of a primordial collision between Mars and a large protoplanet.

The team of astronomers used the same HST technique to observe the little moon as they did for discovering the small moons of Pluto in 2006, 2011, and 2012. Several earlier hunts around Makemake had not succeeded in spotting it. "Our preliminary estimates show that the moon's orbit seems to be edge on, and that means that often when you look at the system you are going to miss the moon because it gets lost in the bright glare of Makemake," commented Dr. Alex Parker in an April 28, 2016 Hubble Press Release. Dr. Parker, who led the image analysis for the observations, is of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado.

Almost every starving child in the world could be fed and clothed for a decade for the cost of sending up only one moon shot. My bible, my conscience, my common sense and every bone in my body says that would be a far better way to spend the fifteen billion bucks.

The Kuiper Belt is situated beyond the orbit of the beautiful, blue, and banded giant gaseous planet, Neptune--the outermost of the eight major planets of our Sun's family. Pluto is a relatively large inhabitant of this region, and it was--initially--classified as the ninth major planet from our Sun after its discovery by the American astronomer Clyde Tombaugh (1906-1997) in 1930. However, the eventual realization among astronomers that the frozen little "oddball" that is Pluto, is really only one of numerous other icy bodies inhabiting the Kuiper Belt, forced the IAU to formally define the term "planet" in 2006--and poor, pitiful Pluto lost its lofty designation of "major planet" only to be re-classified as a mere minor one--a demoted dwarf planet.